About HL7

Health Level-7 or HL7 refers to a set of international standards for the transfer of clinical and administrative data between software applications used by various healthcare providers. These standards focus on the application layer, which is “layer 7” in the OSI model.

The HL7 standards are produced by the Health Level Seven International, an international standards organisation, and are adopted by other standards-issuing bodies such as American National Standards Institute and International Organization for Standardisation.

Transformer and HL7

Transformer dramatically shortens the time taken to build validation and mapping solutions involving the HL7 standard.

The analyst using Transformer creates solutions directly in the intuitive Design-Time GUI. There is no coding stage, even when the required data transformation is highly complex. Projects remain clearly articulated and easy to maintain, and removing the old-fashioned ‘spec handover’ from analyst to developer eliminates a major source of risk and delay.

Transformer’s HL7 message definition library captures all the details of the HL7 standard in a business-friendly way, making them ideal for real-world project needs. Transformer’s libraries provide user-friendly names and full descriptions for all fields, components, and data range values, and fully supports cross-validation rules.  

Users create mappings very easily in Transformer. For example, copying a field from the source to the target message just takes a simple ‘drag and drop’ action – Transformer automatically takes care of any reformatting required between the source and target syntax. To handle more complex mappings, Transformer provides a huge range of ready-made ‘mapping action’ building blocks. These can include conditions, which can in turn be combined into complex logic. So even really complex solutions can be created at lightning pace.

You can also run a test on each new ‘line’ of a mapping or validation as soon as it has been added, moving the testing process as far upstream as possible, and ensuring high quality from the very start. Transformer also provides powerful regression testing facilities to help ensure that future standards changes do not adversely impact existing solutions.

You can learn more about all of these Transformer features here

Deploy anywhere 

Transformer’s simple API and its range of specialised service builders allow solutions to be deployed rapidly into any integration architecture, including OSGi, development frameworks such as Java or .NET, RESTful service containers and traditional Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)/Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) architectures.

Transformer is especially appealing to Red Hat Fuse clients thanks to its deep integration with Camel – the ability to update the Camel Exchange, Header or Body at runtime and share data sources. Trace has created the ability to build an OSGi bundle that can talk to your Camel routes and deploy to Karaf, as well as the ability to run inside a SpringBoot container. And the best part – it all deploys and runs seamlessly on Red Hat OpenShift using the Fuse Integration Services (FIS).

Summary

Transformer offers customers, service providers, and application vendors the tools required to manage message transformations using any EDI standard:

Eliminate coding — Build models with business logic and deploy directly
Create mappings easily — Drag and drop or choose from ready-built mappings
Use ready-built standards libraries — get a head start with regularly updated, comprehensive libraries
Test as you build — Debug quickly and easily without affecting the production environment
Maintain more easily — Model-based approach highlights areas impacted by changing standards
Deploy anywhere — Each deployment is independent and thread-safe